


The Way I Want to Remember Her

by Ewok_Poet



Series: Forever Away from Home [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Child Death, Exodus - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-08 19:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10394613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ewok_Poet/pseuds/Ewok_Poet
Summary: Jumusis canon. The town of Anaslinea was entirely made up.Vagranis between Sacorria and Aurea and there's a lot more of it inSuns of Fortune, where the city of Abatore is mentioned.Ka'zaan Gulf and Anaslinea-Hoc, however, are fanon. So is the burping Sarlacc of Vagran.Mardri Soulworks Collective from Aurea also appears in Suns of Fortune, but nobody ever created it a Wook page.Sublata is a fanon city on Sacorria.More here.Tukka weed and swamp-fever are fanon, the latter is some kind of in-universe malaria.Hocis obviously the Latin pronoun for "here", but even though the townspeople see their town as female, I used the neutral gender variant for Olys Corellisi. a) Haec would just look weird, b) The town name is a lazy anagram to begin with.





	

_Nymph of the Jumus Sea by day, a glistening jewel of the very edge of the Sector in the night. The muse to many artists from the sector. Mardri Soulworks Collective from Aurea, wandering Corellian poets, pseudo-bohemians of Sacorrian liberal sanctuary of Sublata…they all rushed to see her. And welcome them she did. She would take them in her arms and rock them to their sleep. They would wake up the next morning and feel inspired. Recharged and rejuvenated, they would flock to the Black Sands Beach at the very top of the cape and take holos of the Jumus Ocean, paint or find a place to sit in the shade of her old trees. That is how many works of art were made. That is how many friendships started._  
  
_That is the way I want to remember her._  
  
_The fingerprints of a turbulent history that could have been read by generations, in relief, on the many landmarks that our ancestors had built. You could have read it with your fingers, your mind or your heart. Each deep line a big change, each shallow line a small one. All of which she would always emerge from as the winner. All the way, until that very day._  
  
_That is the way I want to remember her._  
  
_Our ancestors built her with their own bare hands, over the course of centuries, as the first settlement on Jumus. Their souls, their minds and their personal history were woven into each single wall and each single floor of our former warm homes. Their beliefs, their secrets and their love was in each single brick of our temple._  
  
_So she was, my Anaslinea. And yours._  
  
_This is the way we should remember her._  
  
_I do not want to remember the burnt ground, the speckled mosaic of ashes and salt. I do not want to remember the subsequent rain, the flimsi we were bombarded by long before the attack dissolving on the bodies of my former neighbours and friends. I do not want to remember leaving. As far as I am concerned, we never left. Our souls are still on Jumus, even though our feet are walking on the black sands of the Ka’zaan Gulf here on Vagran. The souls of those we buried under the ruins have hopefully travelled with us to Vagran, or will be there in a couple of years’ time, depending on what you believe._  
  
He stopped for a moment. There was nothing else to say. There was no fitting end for his stream-of-consciousness speech. He had spent the night tending to his dying child and he could not have possibly prepared an actual speech! He hoped that nobody would see him shed a tear. If the mayor was to lose his hope, then what was left for the others?  
  
He was waiting for the woman to say something. She was not picking up on his clues at first, but then, her face turned into a grin that he could swear was enhanced by synthteeth.  
  
"The Prime Minister of Vagran will now present you with the keycard to your future." She finally blurted out, pointing to the elderly man who had not previously said a word. “The keys to your new home here on Vagran!”  
  
Conveniently, the Prime Minister’s hair looked like a mosaic of ashes and salt. Ravyd Caraway accepted the small wooden box and tried hard not to nod. On Vagran, that would have been considered an enthusiastic gesture. On Jumus, that was a loud no. Either way, he would have offended somebody. Instead of this, he turned around, raising the box above his head. Faced with despair in the eyes of the weak and poor surrounding him, he felt his hands shaking. For a moment, he wondered if the enthusiastic announcer was a Sacorrian and not a Vagranite. She most certainly sounded like one, and the false hope she seemed to be giving to the remaining healthy residents of his new town was stabbing him through the chest. It felt insulting.  
  
Finally, he opened the box. The rustic wooden key with glass elements that must have been done by the skilled artisans from the neighbouring planet of Aurea was stunning, yet it looked like something intended to be in a museum, to tell a tale of somebody and something long gone, not something to be given to living people, to refugees still standing on their weak legs. In a stark contrast to this, the tiny duraplast keycards to the future looked bleak, just like the faces of surviving townspeople.  
  
“Why are these grey and blank?” He asked the Prime Minister. The woman was about to say something, her face slowly breaking into the same, strange grimace that only resembled a smile, but this time, the PM actually managed to speak before she did.  
  
“It’s up to residents of the New Anaslinea…”  
  
“Anaslinea-Hoc, Master. We decided to use Olys Corellisi in its name. ‘Hoc’ as in ‘here’.”  
  
The PM coughed nervously. “It’s up to residents of Anaslinea-Hoc to write their own history on these keycards, or any other keycards, for that matter. You’re staring at the blank page before you and the rest is still unwritten.”  
  
Was that phrase in some coursebook on Galactic Leadership?  
  
“But who is going to write it, Master?” Ravyd asked. “Who is going to write it when one-third of our population succumbed to swamp-fever?”  
  
“You!” The woman jumped in again and pointed to people present. “And you, Master Caraway, you shall be leading them!”  
  
“And you’re so sure of this?” Just like four thousand of his remaining refugees, Ravyd Caraway was no longer hopeful.  
  
“You won, Master Caraway. You saved six thousand souls.” Prime Minister gently put his hand on the mayor’s shoulder. “Once we get the shipment of the antidote from the Corporate Sector, the remaining four thousand of those souls will be able to adopt to Vagran’s biosphere and live the life deserving of such heroes.”  
  
Heroes? Another textbook phrase? They were refugees. They were people who slept in open for one month in order to be able to bring their harvest on the large cargo ships leading them forever away from home. What was heroic about being exiled from one’s home planet?  
  
Vagran was supposed to feel like home. The least inhabited terrestrial planet of the CorSec sure had better seaside locations for a whole town of misplaced people than this? Who in their ever-loving mind would ever place six thousand refugees next to something called 'the burping sarlacc of Vagran", on a swampy field underneath a ghostly abandoned citadel, on top of a fault? How come that a civilised planet, renowned for its symbiosis with wildlife had no sufficient amount of antidote for the swamp-fever? Why was motivation above actual action? Was this what the Galactic Republic was about, in its very core, on the fringe of one of its most prominent sectors?  
  
Ravyd looked at his townspeople again. There was a small smile or two, mostly in older women and the youngest of the children. His son, Largo, was grinning in an almost comical way. Little Karmenee, whose body was waiting twenty kilometres away, in Abatore’s morgue, until the second graveyard was built, she would have smiled, too. For the Caraway offspring, daddy may have been a hero. They had their own reasons, unrelated to textbooks, unrelated to motivational speakers.  
  
The grinning woman led an applause. Most beings clapped mechanically, like the civil engineering droids still working on their new houses. Ravyd led the hoverplatform he stood on to the ground and walked up to Robinia and Largo.  
  
“Let’s go home.” He said. They both shook their heads.  
  
He hoped that no actual Vagranite saw this, they would have likely assumed that his family was just a pile of ungrateful eastern fringe scum. He picked up Largo and held Robinia’s hand. Once they were at their new house in the centre of the town under the apex trees, she was most certainly going to cry again, mourning Karmenee. And so was he, once Largo is in the upstairs room, with the new toy he received from the farmer who sold the whole area to the Abatore Prefecture in the first place – a model of the Corellian Sector, complete with mini-repulsorlifts built in little spheres representing planets.  
  
“Ravyd?” a man approached him from the back. It was a nerf-herder by the name of Sirold Yanik. An actual man dealing with cattle.  
  
“Yes, Sirold?”  
  
“What am I going to do for living? All my animals are gone. The tukka weed turned out to be poisonous for nerfs. On top of this, Krelaa, Enye and I have nothing to eat tonight. We gave all the food to our last breeding male, hoping he would survive; but he was dead come thirty minutes later.”  
  
The mayor nodded and led Sirold towards the newly-built town hall, a glass-domed building underneath a particularly old tree. He shooed away a couple of tiny intaglio-craving droids on his way in, mumbling something that was not particularly graceful. Why didn’t any of these locals think about food supply?  
  
There was no time to mourn Karmenee. There was no time for crying. There was no time to be a mere lackluster refugee.  
  
For Ravyd Caraway, the mayor of Anaslinea-Hoc, had to save whatever could still be saved.

**Author's Note:**

> [Jumus](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jumus) is canon. The town of Anaslinea was entirely made up.  
>   
> [Vagran](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vagran) is between Sacorria and Aurea and there's a lot more of it in [Suns of Fortune](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Suns_of_Fortune), where the city of Abatore is mentioned.  
>   
>  Ka'zaan Gulf and Anaslinea-Hoc, however, are fanon. So is the burping Sarlacc of Vagran.  
>   
> Mardri Soulworks Collective from Aurea also appears in Suns of Fortune, but nobody ever created it a Wook page.  
>   
> Sublata is a fanon city on Sacorria. [More here](http://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-fanon-thread-challenge-1-fanon-roulette-12-11.50024318/page-11#post-52641752).  
>   
> Tukka weed and swamp-fever are fanon, the latter is some kind of in-universe malaria.  
>   
> [Hoc](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_6-Pronouns) is obviously the Latin pronoun for "here", but even though the townspeople see their town as female, I used the neutral gender variant for Olys Corellisi. a) Haec would just look weird, b) The town name is a lazy anagram to begin with.


End file.
